YOU WANT TO MEASURE COPING BUT YOUR PROTOCOLS TOO LONG - CONSIDER THEBRIEF COPE

Studies of coping in applied settings often confront the need to minim ize time demands on participants. The problem of participant response burden is exacerbated further by the fact that these studies typically are designed to test multiple hypotheses with the same sample, a stra tegy that entails the use of many time-consuming measures. Such resear ch would benefit from a brief measure of coping assessing several resp onses known to be relevant to effective and ineffective coping. This a rticle presents such a brief form of a previously published measure ca lled the COPE inventory (Carver, Scheier, Pr Weintraub, 1989), which h as proven to be useful in health-related research. The Brief COPE omit s two scales of the full COPE, reduces others to two items per scale, and adds one scale. Psychometric properties of the Brief COPE are repo rted, derived from a sample of adults participating in a study of the process of recovery after Hurricane Andrew.